David S. Goyer Inks Three-Year First-Look Deal With Warner Bros.

Last week, media sources reported that screenwriter David S. Goyer has signed a three-year first-look deal with Warner Brothers through his company Phantom Four.

According to an article in Variety, "The pact gives the studio 37 first-look deals, including three at New Line. That’s the most of any studio." The deal begins with an untitled sci-fi thriller written by Doug Jung, which Goyer will executive produce with his Phantom Four production president Nellie Stevens-Reed.

Goyer has written several film adaptations of D.C. comic characters and has had success with Warner Brothers in the past. This explains the deal a bit more, considering studio deals are pretty rare today.

This is how the deal went down: Mike Fleming Jr. wrote in Deadline that "Goyer said that he didn’t really need a deal for the past six years because he was so busy on DC Comics superhero scripts. 'I was perfectly happy not having a deal, and just financed the overhead myself,' he told me. 'Warner Bros graciously offered me a deal and they’ve provided the lion’s share of my employment over the last decade, so what the hell?'”

Goyer was the screenwriter for the studio's Man Of Steel, which grossed $665 million worldwide. He wrote the script for the highly anticipated upcoming film Batman vs. Superman, which is due for release in 2015. To name a few of his other past ventures, he wrote the screenplay for Man of Steel, The Dark Knight Rises, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Batman Begins and Blade: Trinity. He has also worked as an executive producer for about a dozen TV series, including Davinci's Demons, Flash Forward, Blade: The Series and Threshold.

According to the Deadline article, this step is just one on his plans for producing and directing more projects in the future. Those include providing outlets for writers. Goyer told Mike Fleming Jr that “Aside from me helping the studio break story on some of their properties and them supporting me as a director, we want to find other projects in an area I could call elevated genre, and this first project falls neatly into the category ... I’ve found TV to be a more collaborative medium for writers than film, and there is a ton of terrific writers working in network TV and basic cable right now. Part of the intent of this deal is to tap that stable of writers and bring them into the feature world as well.”

In other Hollywood news, Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel, City on Fire, has been snatched for a film deal before even having a publishing deal. Check out the ScreenCraft post here.